Top 3 benefits of programmatic

The Internet age has opened up thousands of new opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers wherever they engage with content, be it traditional display, mobile or online video. On top of these channels, there are literally billions of potential combinations an advertiser can choose from to zero in on its key buyer persona, from age to gender to geography, and so on. It's enough to make even the most experienced marketer's head spin.

Kristina: The buzz on programmatic, or real-time bidding, ad options has been growing for about the last year. What does programmatic offer brands that other ad options do not?

Or Shani, CEO, Adgorithms: The best part about programmatic media buying is that it offers advertisers a hands-off approach to campaign optimization by incorporating machine-learning technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), which learn and evolve over time to continually enhance performance by building on what's working and eliminating what's not.

Unless you have a team of data scientists at your beck and call or a budget the size of Texas to spend on manual trial-and-error schemes, chances are you will find programmatic buying beneficial. It helps even the playing field between advertisers big and small by providing a cost-effective advertising tool that requires little need for human involvement beyond establishing campaign goals. That's not to say programmatic media buying will replace advertisers; there's no substitute for human intuition. Advertisers are the masters of their trade, and they can help AI learn even quicker by teaching it what to look out for.

Kristina: What are the top three benefits of programmatic advertising?

Or: • Reach your goals more quickly. Once an advertiser plugs in the campaign's key performance indicators (KPIs), programmatic buying makes it easy for brands to reach these goals with little need for extended ramp-up time. Campaigns typically start small and grow based on channels that deliver high-quality leads. Conversely, a trial-and-error approach casts a wide net, taking considerably longer to narrow down to hit the right KPIs.
• React instantly to changing market dynamics. This is broken down into two distinctive parts. First, programmatic campaigns that use AI technology are continually self-improving by pulling and analyzing data in real time. By viewing traffic ratios and pricing between impressions, clicks, conversions and the time between every action, AI can instantly react to changing market dynamics. Second, since AI never sleeps, it's working every second of every day to measure performance, making tweaks to always deliver a highly optimized campaign. It not only does this faster than manual optimization, but with fewer wasted dollars, it allows marketers to spend more time focused on the strategy and creative behind the ads rather than the tactics.
• Reduce the incidence of ad fraud. Advertisers view ad fraud as a necessary industry evil, but it doesn't have to be this way. The marriage of AI technologies and programmatic optimization creates a fraud-fighting machine that keeps campaigns on track and puts those previously wasted dollars back into driving leads and conversions, allowing advertisers to keep hitting those KPIs. How does it do this? By analyzing traffic patterns, AI can determine where clicks are coming from and how they're converting. By tracking behavior, machine-learning technologies can filter out these low-quality leads and invest more into the channels that are delivering high-quality leads.

As an added bonus for consumers, programmatic buying increases the relevancy of ads that are presented to them, delivering higher-quality experiences.

Kristina: How can programmatic be applied to mobile advertising?

Or: Consumer use of mobile is growing at a rapid rate, but it's still a fragmented industry with multiple players, apps and devices. This complex environment gives advertisers seemingly unlimited possibilities for targeting audiences, which is exactly what programmatic buying excels at narrowing down - and it can do so quicker than humans can. The more data points machine-learning technologies have to choose from, the more targeted the campaign gets. Advertisers that choose to implement programmatic buying on mobile can target the right audience at the right time and drive campaign results on a mass scale, streamlining the mobile ad buying process and making spending more manageable.